A Nerdy Reason to Miss College

First of all, I know I still haven't posted pictures from the hurricane.  I feel guilty about this, but I just don't feel like spending any time at the computer once I get home from work.  Right now, for example, I am blogging from work.

For those of you who might be asking "blogging at work? Are you being a bad employee and blowing off your responsibilities?" I would answer "No, I am currently waiting to hear from the client.  Today we're getting some stuff to run on the server; we had some errors at first, but after some troubleshooting I got it to run successfully and am now waiting to hear back from him about what he wants to do next."

Which leads me to the topic of this blog: as I sit here at my computer, anxiously waiting to hear back from the client, I realize I have an excited anticipation similar to what I feel when waiting to recieve a score on a test I think I did well on.  I think I did very well in this fix, and am hoping to hear from him "Great job! This is exactly what we needed.  I'll go ahead and move on to the next step and let you know how it goes" (equivalent to A+, or maybe just a regular A on a test), but a little bit afraid that he'll say "No, this doens't work.  This isn't what we needed. I don't see how we can make any progress until this is changed" (equivalent to a B-, or C, or F on a test).

This made me realize something: I like tests.  I remember thinking this when I was actually in school, so it's not just something I'm imagining now that I've been out of school for several months.  But I like the chance to test my knowledge and see if I can come up with solutions to challenging problems.  Some people dislike tests because of the studying that is required, but for most of the classes I've taken (or maybe I'm just remembering math classes; I like math tests) the amount of time/energy required to study for a test is significantly less than the amount of time spent during a non-test week on homework.  The best example is the graduate-level math class I took last fall.  Each week I spent 3-5 hours (at least one of which was spent in my professor's office getting help) on really difficult homework problems.  On test week, however, there was no homework assignment, and since I had learned so much by doing the homework, there was very little left to digest to prepare for the test.